Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday January 04, 2013 @10:56AM
from the stay-tuned-for-the-thrilling-conclusion dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The next major release of the Fedora Project's GNU/Linux distribution (named Spherical Cow) was originally scheduled for November 16th. However, an ambitious set of new features has resulted in the project slipping way past its scheduled release. It had fallen three weeks behind before even producing an alpha release and nine weeks behind by the time the beta release was produced. A major redesign in the distribution installer seems to have resulted in the largest percentage of bugs blocking its release. The set-back marks the first time since 2005 in which there was only one major Fedora release during a calendar year instead of two. Currently, the distribution is scheduled for release on January 15th."

Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday January 03, 2013 @10:54AM
from the small-but-dedicated-band-of-belgian-craftsmen dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "When Canonical whipped back the curtain from its upcoming Ubuntu for smartphones, it set off a flurry of blogosphere speculation about the open-source operating system's chances on the open market. But which company would actually build such a device? Apple and Research In Motion and Nokia are all out of the running, for very obvious reasons. Motorola, as a subsidiary of Google, is also unlikely to leap on the Ubuntu bandwagon. While Hewlett-Packard has flirted with smartphones in the past, most notably after its Palm acquisition, the company doesn't seem too focused on that segment at the moment. That leaves manufacturers such as HTC, which currently offer devices running either Google Android or Windows Phone. But given Android's popularity, it might prove difficult for Canonical to convince these manufacturers to do more than release a token Ubuntu device—especially if Google and Microsoft apply counter-pressure."

Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday January 03, 2013 @10:36AM
from the these-are-getting-awesome dept.

New submitter asola writes with this cool piece of small (ha!) news from Liliputing: "This Freescale i.MX6-quad based stick will officially support Ubuntu in addition to Android. This is a first among the newfangled category of ARM-based stick PCs. This Ubuntu may very well have the hw accelerated Gstreamer plugins created by Freescale for the i.MX6 so full HD video playing will be available under Ubuntu as well."

Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday January 03, 2013 @09:31AM
from the single-minded dept.

jrepin writes "Eighteen months ago, Nokia announced a smartphone unlike any other it has produced before. It was a proper smartphone, one that looked miles away from previous Nokia phones: it was sleek, modern and simple at the same time. The hardware was pretty modern, too; no underpowered processors with severely limited RAM issues to be seen here. And, it runs on an operating system that Nokia had announced dead months before the phone's announcement. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Nokia N9."

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @01:40PM
from the next-step-forward dept.

jrepin writes with an excerpt from an an article at OSNews musing on the virtues of those "ugly" old interfaces that were common before Apple's Aqua drove everyone to use visual gloss for its own sake: "Thom Holwerda tends to believe that the best interfaces have already been made. Behaviourally, CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made. It looked like ass, but it always did exactly as you told it to, and it never did anything unexpected. When it comes to looks, however, the gold standard comes from an entirely different corner — Apple's Platinum and QNX's PhotonUI. Between all the transparency, flat-because-it's-hip, and stitched leather violence of the past few years, one specific KDE theme stood alone in bringing the best of '90s UI design into the 21st century, and updating it to give everything else a run for its money. This is an ode to Christoph Feck's Skulpture."

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @09:45AM
from the meego-lives-on dept.

sfcrazy writes with this excerpt from Muktware: "Samsung, which became a market leader thanks to Android, is reportedly working on a smartphone powered by Linux-based Tizen operating system. The company is working with NTT Docomo to create a Tizen powered smartphone. ... Samsung already has its Bada operating system which it uses in some devices. Samsung was expected to merge Bada efforts with Tizen but there has been no attempt in that regards. How Samsung, the Android market leader, positions this phone and creates an app ecosystem around it will be interesting to watch."

Posted
by
timothy
on Friday December 28, 2012 @08:57PM
from the otherwise-of-course-I'd-be-a-kernel-rockstar dept.

An anonymous reader points out just how thick a skin it takes to be a kernel developer sometimes, linking to a chain of emails on the Linux Kernel Mailing List in which Linus lets loose on a kernel developer for introducing a change that breaks userspace apps (in this case, PulseAudio). "Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously. I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken
by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same kernel bug. And you've shown
yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly
and immediately myself. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't
break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I'm angry, because your whole email
was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so
obviously crap. ... The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space,
and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is just
shameful. It's not how we work," writes Linus, and that's just the part we can print. Maybe it's a good thing, but there's certainly no handholding when it comes to changes to the heart of Linux.

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday December 28, 2012 @12:14PM
from the soldering-iron-and-a-chunk-of-silicon dept.

dotancohen writes "I am tasked with building a few Linux machines for a small office. However, many the currently available motherboards seem to be Linux-hostile. For instance, in addition to the whole UEFI issue, my last install was a three-day affair due to the motherboard reporting a Linux-supported ethernet device (the common RTL8168) while it was actually using a GbE Ethernet device that does not work with the legacy drivers and didn't even work with a test Windows 7 install until the driver disk was installed. There are no current hardware compatibility lists for Debian or Ubuntu and I've received from Asus and Gigabyte the expected reply: No official Linux support, install Windows for best experience. I even turned to the two large local computer vendors, asking if they could provide Linux-compatible machines ready to go, but neither of them would be of any help. What globally-available motherboards or motherboard manufacturers can you recommend today?"

Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday December 27, 2012 @12:58PM
from the more-magic-always-welcome dept.

An anonymous reader points out developer Àlex Fiestas's work on multiple monitor configuration for Linux. In particular, the screen manager that he and Dan Vrátil are working on — KScreen — gives KDE users a utility "making the configuration of monitors either auto-magical or super simple." This is one thing that's certainly gotten much better in recent years for Linux GUI users in general, but the video in the linked post makes me a little envious — another good reason to swap desktops once in a while.

Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday December 27, 2012 @10:22AM
from the fight-fight-fight dept.

New submitter Copper Nikus writes "The price of Android Mini PCs have recently dropped to the point they are starting to make the Raspberry Pi look overpriced. This article compares the Raspberry Pi model B against the similarly priced MK802 II single core Android mini PC. IMO it can be argued that the mini PC wins that fight. It's worth noting that several new quad-core Chinese ARM SoCs have been recently released to the world, and it can be expected to see Android mini PCs start using them in the very near future. This should translate into even lower prices for the now 'obsolete' generations of single and dual core Andoid mini PCs out there." The target markets and base OS vary, but there's enough overlap for this comparison to make some sense — both have ARM chips, both can (to varying degrees) run either Android or a more conventional Linux distro, and both can fit in a small pocket.

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday December 26, 2012 @05:02PM
from the perfect-for-those-trips-to-the-'90s dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Slax 7.0 is a Slackware-based Linux distribution that can provide a Live USB/CD environment complete with the KDE4 Plasma desktop in just 210MB of space. Slax can also be customized with other software modules to provide lightweight Linux installations for varying tasks. For those curious how this lightweight Linux distribution has pulled off the feat of being small and fast, Slax creator Tomá Matejícek wrote a technical article explaining the Slax internals with booting a modern Linux desktop in just ~200MB."

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday December 26, 2012 @12:00PM
from the just-a-flesh-wound dept.

After two years of work, Debian m68k has working build servers, and is slowly working through the backlog of stale packages. "Contrary to some rumours which I've had to debunk over the years, the m68k port did not go into limbo because it was kicked out of the archive; instead, it did because recent versions of glibc require support for thread-local storage, a feature that wasn't available on m68k, and nobody with the required time, willingness, and skill set could be found to implement it. This changed a few years back, when some people wrote the required support, because they were paid to do so in order to make recent Linux run on ColdFire processors again. Since ColdFire and m68k processors are sufficiently similar, that meant the technical problem was solved. However, by that time we'd fallen so far behind that essentially, we needed to rebootstrap the port all over again. Doing that is nontrivial, and most of the m68k porters team just didn't have the time or willingness anymore to work on this; and for a while, it seemed like the m68k port was well and truly dead."
The tales of acquiring the needed hardware are pretty interesting (one machine is an Amiga in a custom tower case).

'Twas the night before Christmas,
and while not a creature was stirring (not even an optical mouse),
/.'ers were posting & moderating with squeals of delight.
When out on the Internet there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my keyboard to see what was the matter.
I knew in a moment it must be Alek's Controllable Christmas Lights Webcam.But remembered in previous years it was a hoax - /. said damn.
And then, in a twinkling, I realize Alek has done it for real — W'OH!
With 20,000 lights plus giant inflatable Elmo, Frosty, Santa, SpongeBob, and Homer Simpson — D'OH!
The X10 controls and 3 live webcams provide such clarity,
that it has raised over $70,000 for Celiac charity.
'Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!'"

Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday December 22, 2012 @09:20AM
from the looking-handy dept.

sfcrazy writes "KDE developers have succeeded in running the touch-optimized Plasma Active Linux Distribution on Nexus 7. Earlier Ubuntu developers managed to create a installer for Nexus 7, but those builds also showed that Unity, in its current form, is not ready for touch-based devices. KDE has an edge here as they have optimized versions for netbooks, desktops and touch-based devices so a user doesn't have to make any compromises as one has to do with other DEs or shells which are focusing more in touch-based devices only." Here are detailed instructions on how to install it.

Posted
by
timothy
on Friday December 21, 2012 @09:12PM
from the unlimited-power dept.

The Enlightenment front page bears this small announcement: "E17 release HAS HAPPENED!" The release announcement is remarkably spartan — it's mostly a tribute to the dozens of contributors who have worked on the software itself and on translating it into many languages besides system-default English. On the other hand, if you've been waiting since December 2000 for E17 (also known as Enlightenment 0.17), you probably have some idea that Enlightenment is a window manager (or possibly a desktop environment: the developers try to defuse any dispute on that front, but suffice it to say that you can think of it either way), and that the coders are more interested in putting out the software that they consider sufficiently done than in incrementing release numbers. That means they've made some side trips along the way, Knuth-like, to do things like create an entire set of underlying portable libraries. The release candidate changelog of a few days ago gives an idea of the very latest changes, but this overview shows and tells what to expect in E17. If you're among those disappointed in the way some desktop environments have tended toward simplicity at the expense of flexibility, you can be sure that Enlightenment runs the other way: "We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties. Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17. It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday December 21, 2012 @10:11AM
from the for-the-really-hard-way-close-your-eyes-first dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Here is a free interactive beta of Learn Linux The Hard Way; a web-based virtual Linux environment which introduces the command line and other essential Linux concepts in 30 exercises. It's written in the style of Zed A. Shaw's Learn Code the Hard Way lessons. The authors says, 'You will encounter many detailed tables containing lists of many fields. You may think you do not need most of this information, but what I am trying to do here is to teach you the right way to approach all this scary data. And this right way is to interpret this data as mathematical formulas, where every single symbol has its meaning.' Of course, my first entry was rm -rf /* which only produced a stream of errors. I wish I had discovered something like a long time ago."

Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday December 20, 2012 @04:24PM
from the if-you-want-it dept.

Open source (as Torque 3D recently became) is one thing; cross-platform is another. Now, reader iamnothing writes "GarageGames is heading to IndieGoGo to port Torque 3D to Linux. The campaign is centered around hiring a dedicated developer or team to port Torque 3D to Linux. The primary target is Ubuntu 32bit with other flavors of Linux as stretch goals. All work will be done in the public eye under our Github repository under the MIT license."